We are OK Go! We're here to talk, Reddit, so Ask Us Anything!

Our official bio:

With a career that includes award-winning videos, New York Times op-eds, a major label split and the establishment of a DIY trans-media mini-empire (Paracadute), collaborations with pioneering dance companies and tech giants, animators and Muppets, and an experiment that aims to encode Hungry Ghosts on actual strands of DNA, OK Go continue to fearlessly dream and build new worlds in a time when creative boundaries have all but dissolved. The band has been honored with a GRAMMY, three MTV Video Music Awards (one of them from Japan!), a CLIO, two WEBBY Awards (including one for their collaboration with The Muppets and Sesame Street), a spot in a Guggenheim installation, and a total of eight Cannes Lions - the advertising world's most prestigious awards.

We just don't subscribe to last century's categorical definitions aas much as most folks do... When I was in high school in the 90's, music came in one container (a CD), films came in another (theaters), tv came in another (that box in your living room), journalism another (newsprint), and on and on ad infinitum. Now every one of those supposedly distinct cultural forms is distributed the exact same way -- all of them are ones and zeros that you get through your phone or laptop -- and the boundaries between them are more and more arbitrary every day. So we chase our creative ideas wherever they lead, and it doesn't particularly bother us if an idea winds up being visual as opposed to auditory. For us, the joy is in making stuff, and we feel super lucky that we have such a broad and inspiring canvas to work with. Plus, we love our songs. Every band has critics... fuck'em. -- damian

We have lots of great answers for this - but deep down I know I love making the music - I'd do it with these guys regardless if anyone heard it or liked it. It's art, it allows us to express things to each other - and hopefully other people - and that brings all closer. it feels great to make. - Dan

The name OK Go is an old inside joke from when Damian and I were 11 and met at summer arts camp in Northern Michigan. It's something our stoned art teacher would say to us right before he expected us to have an artistic psychedelic awakening. -Tim

The only way to avoid the trap is just to focus on what you're making presently and make the best thing you possibly can, and I think we do that pretty well. When you try to "beat" something or make a "hit", you're almost guaranteed to make something bad.

Also, the question about where the ideas come from.... People usually assume when they see our videos that the whole idea sprung out fully formed. But what you see as a complicated, elaborate single idea is actually a simple, ridiculous idea followed by a long process of development and collaboration which turn it into a better idea, and hopefully a thing that actually exists, rather than just another crazy idea. In short: having crazy ideas is easy, but getting them to happen is hard. -- Damian

It was the craziest adventure I've ever been on. It was thrilling and terrifying. Zero gravity is such a foreign feeling that I'm still trying to figure out a way to describe the experience. We spent 3 weeks outside of Moscow rehearsing and filming. Most people know that the zero gravity flights cause a lot of people to throw up. No one in the band nor Trish our director threw up. But there was a lot of throwing up around us from the crew. Almost 60 barf ups! -Tim

We get dressed in the most dirty stinky clothes you could ever imagine - stand around shouting into the air that we can hear sound coming through our in-ear monitors - and then right before we hit the stage we get eveyone on our crew to put their hands together and in unison say; : "and you don't stop and you don't quit... Fun!"

I once had a guy in the street ask me if I was the guy in OKGo. And I said, "No, but I get that all of the time." And then he said, "Yeah now that I'm seeing you up close it's obvious that you're not. But from a distance you really look like him." -Tim

I am very impressed with Kanye's assessment that, because he is the greatest living artist, he needs $1B from M. Zuckerberg. Following that logic, I would like to say that, while we are not the greatest living band, we're probably in the top thousand or so, and I believe we are thus entitled to somewhere in the neighborhood of $315 from Mark Z. -- Damian

I love his records. he reminds me of someone off the WWE. He's putting on a show. It works. I enjoy watching his antics. They don't really bother me. If he ends up making a crappy record, I think that would bother me worse. - Dan

Picking between two of our videos is a little like picking between two of your children. I love them both, in different ways. But I think what we did with the video for the recorded track (the Rube Goldberg version, as opposed to the live marching band recording) was more of a "first". I had never seen an RGM that runs in time to music before, where the mechanical activities are actually choreographed to occur at precise moments in time. -- Damian

I find that touring actually gets harder as you get older. the novelties of travel (at least of that very particular type of travel) wear off, and it's tough to have your "normal" life become so episodic and broken up. I still love playing the shows -- the hour or two on stage is always great -- but the toll it takes on the rest of life feels greater as we get older ,sadly.
-- damian

Well... it's definitely harder. It's still thrilling to play music in front of people but now with having a child it's much harder. Unless he comes to the show - then it's the best thing in the world. - Dan

I always get incredibly homesick when I first leave for tour. I'm a super homebody. I eventually get use to the rhythm of tour. But in a lot of ways I am the most unlikely candidate to be in a band and tour. I'm a dorky dude who loves being home. All that said I realize what incredible luck we have to be able to tour. And the thrill of playing shows, connecting, and sharing with people is what makes touring worth it. -Tim

I strangely try to stay really calm and quiet. Maybe I'm trying to conserve my energy for stage. But I can sometime shake or rattle myself if I try to get too hyped before a show. And then I get to stage and forget everything I'm suppose to do. So basically, I'll sit and just stare at the wall a lot of the time. Or just pace around and try to clear my mind. -Tim

You've become the quintessential example of Rube Goldberg machines (and have seen multiple music videos by teachers to demonstrate this concept). What inspired you to make a video so needlessly complex?

Andy is being modest. Making an RGM was his idea. He showed me a video of one that someone had made in their office and we started imaging what it would be like if we could scale it up and make it "dance" to the music. --damian

One song I've always wanted to cover, but haven't, is the Catch by The Cure. I don't know why the desire to cover that song is so strong. It's definitely not a super well known Cure song. But I think it's my favorite of there's. It's just really simple and beautiful. It feels like he's describing a fairly quiet moment in life. And I think there's something really nice and charming about that. -Tim

Yes, lots of paint got into my ears on most takes. And I would always try to shake it out, but it wouldn't come out! It would all come pouring out once double gravity set in. But there were takes where paint would get in my ears and then on my glasses. So I couldn't see or hear very well. -Tim

The paint was water based, and still wet when the plane landed. I don't know how our Russian cleanup crew did it, but the plane was spotless in about an hour. Though, the cleaning left the inside very wet. You can actually see towards the end of the video, our aerialists are sitting on magazines so their clothes don't have huge wet spots. --Andy

Way back in 2002, I thought I'd heard on NPR that your first album was originally very prog-rock and was rerecorded into what was released. Is that in the past - or might we hear those original recordings someday?

I believe a lot of those original recordings are out there in the world. And if not I would be totally happy to have that early material available. I think in the early days of learning how to write and record songs we made some really really strange but interesting choices at times because we were just kind of like, "I don't know what to do here, tryyyyyyyyyy THIS!!!" And it would be some incredibly weird left turn. That stuff is fun for me to go back and listen to now. -Tim

Now that you've been to space, shot a video inside a Rube Goldberg machine and ran on treadmills, is there anything left you to do in this Solar System? How do you guys plan on topping what you've done so far?

(btw I also really like the original marching band this too shall pass music video, mainly because I know some people that got to be in it)

What was it like to collaborate with Perfume, MIKIKO, Daito Manabe, and ELEVENPLAY? And what drew you to collaborate with them in the first place? They all seem very fond of OK Go and I'm really excited to see all the cool projects you have been working on together!

Daito is an amazing guy, and a really inspired collaborator, and geting to know ELEVENPLAY and Perfume has been amazing. The project we've been chasing with Rhizomatiks is unfortunately on hold right now, though. One of the prices we pay for trying to tackle really ambitious projects is that they sometimes get stuck halfway... Right now, it's unclear if our collaboration with Daito will get across the finish line. We remain optimistic, of course. -- Damian

Probably that it's very difficult to pull off the same move twice in zero gravity. The quality of zero g was different each parabola. So being able to push off of something and fly in exactly the same way every take was incredibly difficult. We tried to choreograph around those issues as best we could. And eventually everyone got pretty good at hitting their marks. -Tim

Good one! For me, the toughest thing was to figure a way to stop slamming my head against the meddle bar on the ceiling of the plane. (it had nothing to with the video - I just couldnt stop slamming my head) - Dan

But that video was pretty inspirational in general. One of those amazing pieces of work -- great song, great video, great feeling -- that made me want to spend my life chasing ideas like the ones we do.
-- Damian

We love music. We love making things. And we love chasing our wildest and craziest ideas. The career path we've chosen is a pretty uncertain one. But I think we all love what we do enough to face the scary parts of uncertainty. And it helps when we have each other to face them with. -Tim

I have been a fan of your guys' music for a long time, and I've always wondered over the years, where does the inspiration for your music videos come from?
Thanks for taking the time to do this for the fans and continuing to create art in both visual and musical forms :-)

The very loose ideas can come from anywhere (a story on the radio, a talk we heard, a talk with a friend...) but as I've alluded to in other answers, the real meat of the idea actually comes in the collaborative play process. I was just responding to an interviewer by email on a related topic... pasting here:

Our process is kind of different from how people normally film things. The normal process can sort of be boiled down to two steps: a lot of very careful planning, and then a vey efficient period of shooting. It makes a lot of sense, because shooting is so expensive; that’s when you’ve got your big crew, all the equipment, locations, permits, and all of that. So generally the first step is to sit down at a desk, think through all the obstacles, and make an air-tight plan. It saves a ton of money, but it means you wind up limited to ideas it’s possible to have at a desk.

Our process always includes at least a third step. We still start with the idea, of course, but once we’ve got a promising one (it seems likely we can build a good arc within it, etc), we put ourselves into the scenario and leave ourselves a lot of time to play around and see what works. Whether it’s playing with dogs, or with machines, or with optical illusions, once we’re actually in the situation, we start having ideas there’s no way we could possibly have imagined in advance, and those become the real skeleton of the project. Then we go back and do the more traditional preparation once we have the new and improved idea, and eventually we’re ready to shoot.

In the Rube Goldberg video for This Too Shall Pass we tried to design the machine so that the small more precarious parts were in the beginning of the video. So if something that was more likely to fail did, at least we wouldn't be in minute three. If something failed early on, set up was around 5-10 minutes. But if it was later in the video set could take an hour. -Tim